Everyone's a victim of bad timing sometimes. These gadgets brought revolutionary new features to the market. They just did it a little too soon.

PalmPilot

PalmPilot

The idea of syncing your data from one device made its debut in 1997 with the PalmPilot, one of the first personal digital assistants. You could run apps for tracking your schedule, making notes, and organizing your business contacts. And long before the days of cloud computing and Wi-Fi networks, the PalmPilot had a unique feature where you could connect the device to your computer to sync all of your data. This worked exactly like Dropbox does today—except that there was no Internet syncing, the files were incredibly small, and none of this occurred automatically. To sync, you had to connect the PalmPilot physically, then start a software program to copy the data back and forth. Poor Palm was simply ahead of its time, as synching has become the way of today.

Apple MessagePad 2000/2100 (Newton)

Apple MessagePad 2000/2100 (Newton)

Apple had one major public failure in its history (unless you count the recent debacle with the Apple Maps app): Apple Newton. Widely regarded as one of the worst computing devices ever, the original Newton was supposed to be like the modern iPad. You could jot down notes, and the Newton would "translate" them into text characters. The problem was in accurately converting the handwriting to text; Apple figured out how to make it work more reliably. But by the time the company had worked out many of the technology bugs, the Newton had already generated too much negative buzz to succeed.

Newton's handwriting feature came along a decade too soon. Today tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Note II use a pen interface, and the apps for converting text are fairly reliable. One of the best examples of character recognition is the Evernote Smart Notebook. You can write handwritten notes, snap a picture of the notes with your phone through the Evernote app, and convert the notes to text.